


The Eight Stages of Taylor Costa-Brown

by xbritomartx



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Parents, Cauldron, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27216307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xbritomartx/pseuds/xbritomartx
Summary: Taylor triggers with the power to be a child conceived of and raised by Cauldron.Art by ElCuervo.
Relationships: Kurt/Fortuna/Rebecca
Comments: 52
Kudos: 236





	1. Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Taylor Costa-Brown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12174975) by [Omega_93](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omega_93/pseuds/Omega_93). 



Silence except for the slide of stiletto against steel.

The back of his neck began to sweat. He'd been caught between the two before—it was how he'd gotten into this predicament in the first place—but it had never felt like a trap.

"Parenthood is little more than the product of collective imagination," Kurt said. He turned away from the little more in question, the infant in Rebecca's arms, to look at his only exit. Contessa was still blocking it, leaning against the door frame as she sharpened her knife. 

She wore no expression.

He looked back at Rebecca, whose expression was distinctly unimpressed. 

"Then again, being raised by two parents is ideal for human development. It makes members of our species able to participate in such shared delusions more effectively."

Everyone in the room, including his first- and hopefully last-born, stared at him.

He was babbling. He needed to contribute something substantive, or one or the other of them would do him an injury. So he squinted at the shapeless blob, trying to guess its sex based off of the dimensions of its skull. Fruitless. "We should call the child Taylor. An excellent name. Zero point two five percent of children born in the United States last year had the name Taylor. Common, but not overdone. Ideal."

"What would be ideal is for you to understand that I have two full-time jobs on different sides of the North American continent," Rebecca said. "You're raising her, Daddy-O."


	2. Will

"Daddy," Taylor said.

"Taylor," he said. He picked her up. There were no chairs in his office and his desk had his work on it, so he simply held her as he paced about the room. Like everything he did, this served many purposes at once. It provided touch and acknowledgment, which were important parts of primate development, and kept her off his desk. "Where's your mother?"

"Los Angeles." She stumbled over the pronunciation of the city's name. He didn't try to correct her; at her age, the human brain was uniquely pliable in terms of language, and she would learn without him talking down to her. "Why can't I go to Los Angeles?"

"If people knew about you, they might try to hurt you because they don't like your mother."

"Why don't they like her?"

"She has power."

"What's power?"

"Power is when you can get what you want, even if somebody else doesn't want you to. I can make you go to bed and I can pick you up even if you don't want me to. Your mother can make people lose fights. All that is power."

Taylor took a moment to digest this. She was always thoughtful and deliberate, and he appreciated that. A toddler could be a larger nuisance, not that he wanted his work to be interrupted at all. He hoped she was absorbing something about criminality, political leverage, and the intrinsically exploitable nature of human relationships so that all of this was not a complete waste of time. 

"What are you doing?"

"I am thinking about money."

"What's money?"

He glanced at his desk, where he was building a way to access and sort information on every part of Bet's economy. Information that he alone could understand and he would use to steer the world. "A subset of power." 

"What kind of power?"

"It is something that somebody trades for something else."

"Like a favor?"

He made a mental note to ask Contessa whether Taylor had overheard anything important. 

"Analogous," he said. "It comes with a predetermined value that remains the same regardless of its possessor, assuming certain external factors remain stable."

She looked blank, which—because it came from Rebecca—he knew indicated her disapproval rather than her confusion. _And just what the hell do you mean by that, Kurt?_ and _Make sense, Daddy_ : one coin, two sides.

"I..." An explanation from scarcity wouldn't work; she had never experienced any. Numbers wouldn't work because she could barely count, let alone add or multiply. He might have drawn on her media consumption, but Rebecca chose all of that and he didn't know anything about it.

So he used time, the only finite resource she'd come across. He talked about how she had a limited supply of minutes and she _had_ to spend a lot of them on things like sleeping and eating; he talked about tradeoffs and the necessity of making choices, and, in a roundabout way, why she hardly ever saw Rebecca. He resumed his programming (with one hand) and transitioned into explaining the global economy from the ground up, continuing long after her head had collapsed against his shoulder.

"She's three, Kurt," Contessa said, when she finally bothered to rescue him.

"And," he said, allowing his voice a note of triumph so muted it just came out smug, "asleep."


	3. Purpose

Literacy: it couldn't arrive fast enough. Taylor wanted to read, and Kurt wanted her to be able to find the answers to her own questions. He also wanted Contessa out of his office; she tended to show up when Taylor did, and he couldn't shake the suspicion, ridiculous though it was, that she was learning alongside their child.

But he was forbidden from assisting. Rebecca had claimed _this_ milestone for herself and herself alone. She placed a wooden block on the ground in between her daughter and herself.

Taylor scrutinized it for a moment. Her fifth birthday was just around the corner, but she was already wearing glasses—his genes—and that gave her a preternaturally serious look. "N," she announced.

Rebecca beamed. "That's right. What's N stand for?"

"Nepotism," Taylor said promptly. 

Rebecca glared at him.

"Nietzsche? Number?"

"Right again," Rebecca said encouragingly. She placed another block on the N. "What about this?"

"O. Ontological wasteland."

"Kurt," Rebecca said. 

There was a threatening undertone to her voice, but he was safe. Contessa was using his lap as a pillow and Rebecca wouldn't disturb her. "Yes?"

"Have you been coaching her?"

"He's merely been describing his own mental landscape," Contessa said. Naturally she'd woken precisely when he'd imagined her rest would grant him protection. Safety, like most human constructions, was ever an illusion. "The man thinks clothes are a delusion and that chairs are a danger."

"Delusion," Taylor said, and pointed to a D. "Danger. Doctor."

Contessa closed her eyes.

"Just so," Rebecca said, and picked up an R.

"P?" Taylor offered.

"Not quite," Rebecca said, as she added the D and O to the stack.

"Oh, no. R. Like Rebecca."

"The first letter I learned," Rebecca said, smiling, and took her daughter through L, U, and A (logarithm, unicorn, apple) before coming to C.

"C is for Kurt," Taylor said.

Rebecca explained, or attempted to explain because there was no genuine, rational reason, why the English language assigned two symbols to the voiceless velar plosive/stop.

"C would be for Contessa," she finished. A sudden gust of wind struck the tower, which collapsed. More bursts scattered its constituent parts to all corners of the room. "Or Custodian."

This kind of thing was why he never acknowledged her. She seemed to have a fondness for Taylor, but mostly showed it through violence of one kind or another. He'd once tried to leave Taylor in her care so he could rewrite Bet America's tax code, and she'd beaten him about the head until he'd given up and returned.

After a minute of scrambling, Taylor reassembled the blocks in the order that Rebecca had stacked them. "Cauldron," she declared.

Custodian knocked the tower over again.


	4. Competence

"This is preposterous," Taylor said.

"I do not disagree," Kurt said. 

She pounced on what she perceived to be a weakness. "So I don't have to do it?" 

"You do," he said. "And you know better than to attempt to divide your mothers and me."

Taylor shrugged. "One day, one of you will misstep and I will be there to reap the rewards. I will stay up late, eat three slices of cake, get Custodian to make my bed…" 

She continued to enumerate childish sins she hadn't seriously attempted to commit in upwards of two years, watching him intently, looking for any reaction out of the ordinary, anything she could exploit.

Rebecca.

"You are delaying," he said. "Explain your business plan."

Taylor sighed. "Product: lemonade. Ingredients, three, to wit: first, one hundred percent pure organic cane sugar—which is, of course, merely sugar. Second, rich, sharp lemons hand-picked at peak goldenitude from a sunny tropical grove. That is to say, lemons. Third, last, and least: mineral water bottled from alpine springs; in a word: water. Combined in the ideal ratio as passed down from mother to daughter for generations untold, tart and sweet at once, crisp and cool in the summer heat, et cetera." She pronounced the classical Latin correctly.

His brand of analysis. "And the stand itself?"

Taylor opened her graph-ruled notebook and flipped to a page with a lemonade stand drawn in pencil, likely with the aid of a ruler. There was a scale, he noted; each square represented thirty-six square inches. "Cardboard is out of the question," she said. "Unprofessional and would not hold up to the elements. Plywood, painted—no, stained."

"How do you propose to acquire your materials?"

Taylor, to what he was certain would have been Rebecca's horror, did not miss a beat. "I could steal them," she exclaimed, rubbing her hands with glee. He was fairly certain she'd lifted the gesture from the most recent villain on _Protectorate Pals._

"Ah, how about I just take you shopping." A _door_ later and they were wandering through the aisles of a hardware store. He told her about investments and start-up capital as they sorted through the lumber, vacillated over the shade of stain, and argued over whether Taylor was allowed to use power saws (in the end, he decided she was).

She directed the assembly, and all he did was hold things in place—at her direction—so she could nail them together.

He also watched closely to make sure she didn't slice her fingers off with the saw, but the precaution proved to be unnecessary. She was careful, precise, orderly. Measuring twice, cutting once. Contessa.

Once the lemonade stand was finished, he cheated a bit and took her to the entrance of a popular suburban park so that she'd get a significant number of customers.

Four hours later, Rebecca pronounced the affair a disaster.

"Let me make sure I have this right," she said. "You didn't sell lemonade like you were supposed to. You recruited another child and made _him_ sell it for you while you played on the swingset."

"I paid him," Taylor said, defiantly sticking out her chin. She was tall for her age, but when Rebecca was cross she had a way of making even adults seem small. 

"What fraction of the profits did you pay him?"

"One twelfth," Taylor said. She didn't mumble—none of her parents would abide mumbling—but her voice was quiet.

"I see," Rebecca said. "You were supposed to learn a lesson about hard work."

"I think she did," Kurt remarked, and was glad to see his intervention made Taylor relax a little.

Relenting, Rebecca leaned back in her chair and hummed. "I'll whip up an abridged version of _Capital_."


	5. Fidelity

So Rebecca had successfully inculcated a conventional sense of morality in their daughter. And now here she was, so attached to what she had been taught, that she was confronting them over what, exactly, had been happening in the lower storeys of the skyscraper she'd lived in all her life.

"I know it looks ugly," Rebecca was saying. "But—" 

"'Looks ugly,'" Taylor repeated. " _Looks ugly_. Ugliness is nothing more or less than a quality _looks_ can have. Nothing can _look_ ugly without _being_ ugly. And it _looks_ like you have dozens of people locked up, and some of them—most of them—are twisted. Monsters."

 _They aren't locked up._ He didn't say it. Rebecca would say it was unhelpful. Contessa would call him a pedant. And Taylor would be disgusted.

Taylor picked up on some change in Rebecca's face. "Not dozens?" she said. " _Hundreds_?"

"Nine hundred eighty-three," he said, sparing Rebecca from having to answer.

"And you did it all? On purpose?"

There was a pause that lasted several seconds.

"Yes," Rebecca said.

Taylor's face twisted, and all of them were abruptly pitched into a daze. By the time his mind had cleared, Contessa was already at Taylor's side and pulling her to her feet. "You triggered," she said.

"Don't talk to me," Taylor snarled, trying and failing to wrench her arm out of Contessa's grip. "You'll make me change my mind and that—"

Contessa released her and returned to her place between him and Rebecca. He suspected she was suppressing any reaction she might have had out of respect for Taylor's request, but perhaps that assessment was projection on his part.

"I was dying when I was your age," Rebecca said, her voice even. "The Doctor approached me and I volunteered to be a test subject. Hero, Legend, and Eidolon, as well. Contessa's—different, but she could have ended up the same way."

He saw Taylor waver, torn between what she'd seen and what she was wanting to hear. 

Encouraged, Rebecca continued. "You've already forgotten, but when you triggered you saw something. What you saw, what gave you power, is here to destroy the worlds. All of them. We're fighting it. We just aren't as good as it, so there is trial and error."

"I…" Taylor said. "No. Even if that's true, that doesn't account for how you're treating them. There's another way. There's got to be."

She stormed out the door. The Custodian prevented her from successfully slamming it behind her, but he respected the intent behind the gesture.

"She means to leave," Contessa said, once ten or fifteen seconds had passed. 

"Will she expose us?" he asked.

"No."

They both looked to Rebecca, giving her the final say. 

After a moment, she nodded sharply. "So we let her go."


	6. Love

"This is my boyfriend," Taylor announced defiantly, as though she expected to be challenged for simply stating facts. "His name is Weld and we are very happy together."

Customarily, Rebecca didn't miss a beat. "Pleased to meet you, Weld. Would you like something off the appetizer menu? I'm thinking the loaded potato skins."

"I don't eat much," he said. His sheepish smile exposed perfectly straight zinc teeth. He was handsome, though something told Kurt that Taylor did not particularly care.

"On account of the immoral human experimentation and all," Taylor said, confirming his suspicions.

Weld looked more uncertain by the second. "Did I walk into something?" he asked cautiously. 

"You wouldn't know anything about all that, would you, _mom_?"  


"I do, as a matter of fact," Rebecca said. "Did Taylor mention I work for the PRT?"

Weld's smile returned. "The name gave it away," he said.

"Yes, we both have names," Taylor said. "You know, Weld goes by Weld and not whatever his parents, whom I'm certain loved him very much, named him, because he can't remember anything. Not even his name."

"Taylor…" Weld began.

"I did not tell him you worked for the PRT," Taylor said, speaking over him. All of Rebecca's original self-righteousness was shining through her. "Because that would be a lie. It would be more accurate to say that you simultaneously dominate and undermine the PRT."

"I should go," Weld said.

Kurt removed his napkin from his lap and placed it on his empty plate. "Not at all," he said. "Taylor and I will go. You should get what information you can from Rebecca."

He took hold of his daughter's arm and dragged her out of the restaurant, leaving Rebecca to continue talking her way around what Taylor hadn't really wanted her to say. It was hard going because she kept using her power to do things like turn his tongue into an angry hermit crab, but he persevered.

Once they were in the alleyway, he spat out the crab and waited for his tongue to grow back.

"You're using him to get at us," he said. "That isn't the right thing to do. I'm certain he has enough difficulties."

"You don't care."

"I don't," he agreed. "But you do. And your mothers do."

"Contessa's not—" 

"Stop it."

She did.

Then she demanded to know _why_ and they both pretended she wasn't crying while he explained.


	7. Care

Taylor continued to live on Bet, going to and graduating from college without their support. Understanding her family's motivations and their goal hadn't convinced her to accept the means they'd chosen, even taking Contessa into account. She had even refused to join the Protectorate and instead worked as an independent hero just to drive the point home.

Which wasn't to say she wasn't involved. She made a point to build relationships over the years by attending every Endbringer fight though her power was not particularly useful outside of rendering first aid, reach out to Case 53s, and keep herself in the public eye as much as she could.

Kurt suspected that Rebecca was proud of her defiance and that Contessa admired it. Personally, he thought her behavior was irrational and found her choice of double major, English and Philosophy, to be mildly insulting.

Ultimately they didn't reconcile until Scion unleashed his grief and wrath shortly after Taylor's twenty-fifth birthday.

When Cauldron came forward to help coordinate a defense, Taylor challenged them by spilling their secrets. She shared the plans they had acquired from Accord, the deals they had made with different worlds, the extent of their knowledge about their enemy and how it had been acquired, and all they had done. She demanded transparency in the name of unity, and the clout she'd acquired over the years lent her demands a great deal of weight.

Contessa had seen this coming for years but hadn't done anything to stop her. In fact, she'd been helping her out through ways even Taylor, who was expecting it, couldn't detect. With Contessa's defection, the remainder of Cauldron - to say nothing of everyone else - was forced to fall in line with Taylor's ideas.

Not that it really would have taken much persuasion. They were each confident in Taylor for different reasons, and others seemed to agree. Between her open encouragement of cooperation and Contessa's background discouragement of disunity, the defense was able to stay together until they hit on a line of attack that worked.

The aftermath was a different matter entirely. They had to rebuild Cauldron rapidly to provide the support necessary for implementing Accord's plans. Contessa quit entirely, leaving them vulnerable at a time when they were under more scrutiny than ever before. And Taylor led largely by placing hard limits on what she deemed acceptable.

They managed.


	8. Wisdom

Kurt believed that birthdays were arbitrary, both temporally and culturally. For instance, there was no reason to wait a full year before applying the designation "one." The Chinese, just to pick an example at random, traditionally applied "one" immediately upon birth. There were other examples of cultures celebrating the hundredth day of a child's life rather than the first one, and still others that simply aged everyone up come new year's day.

Furthermore, there was no logical reason why numbers that ended in zero should have especial significance. Humans lived to an average of about seventy-one, which surely meant that markers of individuals' age should revolve around that number rather than ten. There was nothing particularly sensible about using decades instead of sevens, so—

"Dad," Taylor said.

He stopped rambling.

"All I said was it's weird that I look older than mom." She picked the knife she'd been using back up and resumed applying icing to a cupcake. "I wasn't fishing for a treatise on why birthdays are a collective delusion."

He iced a cupcake using the absolute minimum number of movements required for a satisfactory job, waiting to see if she would say what was actually on her mind. When she didn't, he took the initiative. "You also weren't just making casual conversation. I can guess what you were actually getting at, but I would rather you say."

Taylor gestured at the cupcakes. There were sixty, only thirty-six of which were finished. "Mom's turning sixty, but she looks younger than you. She looks younger than _me_."

"Go on," he said.

Two more cupcakes joined their iced fellows before Taylor resumed. "We're all going to die before she does."

"Very likely."

"It doesn't bother you? The two of you aging while she doesn't?"

"Not overmuch," he said. He glanced at the rows of completed cupcakes. He hoped their dwindling number would put a time limit on the conversation. "We've always known, and there is little point in dwelling on it. I hope you won't say anything to her."

He caught her confused look, but she thought about it instead of automatically asking him to explain himself.

"She'll remember," she said at length.

He nodded. "Based on actuarial tables, my family's medical history, and the efficacy of currently available treatments, I anticipate dying of heart failure between two and three decades from now. I suspect Contessa will outlive me by five to fifteen years, but if she's drawn any more specific conclusions, she's kept them to herself. You'll likely live to see one thirty."

Taylor waited patiently for him to conclude, though she had undoubtedly deduced where he was headed.

"Rebecca will remain for centuries. She's the one who has to contend with the grief. Our—or your—preemptive distress won't help her do that."

They continued their project. When he calculated that enough time had passed she wasn't going to follow up on her own, he spoke again. "Might I suggest another explanation for your concern?"

"You might," she said gravely.

"Maybe it's your own midlife crisis," he said gently. "We can tell when you check us over with your power, and we can tell you're doing it because the first of us has closed on sixty. We know you're concerned about our welfare, but it's not as though we have one foot in the grave yet."

Taylor pursed her lips, but picked up another cupcake instead of trying to pretend he was off the mark. Whatever her feelings on a given subject, she was always dispassionate enough to consider how things truly stood.

But though she acquiesced, admitted that she was concerned about her own losing battle with entropy as well as theirs, he thought there was still something more she needed. "You know we never expected to make it this far."

He wouldn't go so far as to say something as ridiculous as _every day is a gift_ ; Rebecca would punch him so hard he'd fly beyond the horizon, and he would applaud her. "We're left facing a situation we didn't plan for when we..."

"Started screwing?" she offered, rescuing him from his awkwardness in the worst possible way.

She smirked and he rubbed his chin, trying to use the comparatively lower temperature of his hand to counteract the blush. Kurt knew it wasn't genetically possible, but Fortuna had somehow managed to pass her sadistic sense of humor on to Taylor.

He swallowed a _we were nineteen_ _and under considerable pressure_ (obviously) and suppressed a purely instinctual _and just where did you learn that kind of language, young lady_ (Rebecca) and focused on hammering his point home. "Our life expectancy was forty-five at most, and we're fifteen years past that."

"I understand," she said. "But that was something _you_ prepared for. By the time _I_ believed you about the world ending and knew so many people would die so soon, it was practically happening."

They returned to their work. They were almost done with this, the first of the pre-party chores Fortuna had assigned them.

"We've always dealt on large scales—the largest possible for our species, right from the very beginning. You're part of that."

Taylor sighed. She sounded like a teenager again, and the rolled eyes made her look like one. "I know. I saved everything the second time around, remember?"

"You don't understand the magnitude of that achievement," he said. "Nor do I think you've internalized the weight of what you've done by controlling six planets for a decade."

"It would be impossible to quantify in terms I could understand," she said, parroting something he'd said to her when she was twenty-two.

Kurt appreciated that she knew he wasn't reproving her. Less than a dozen people understood what a bare fact simply stated looked like, and only two aside from Taylor weren't offended when he produced them. "No," he said.

Then he hesitated. He had never been able to truly detach from his detachment, not the way other people seemed to, but he could tell she was struggling in a way that showing her charts and equations wouldn't resolve.

"Hardly anyone else can. Rebecca does, and she'll remember—"

She made a throwaway gesture, embarrassed even now by the slightest hint of paternal pride, or whatever he had that was reminiscent of paternal pride.

"But for most everyone, it will boil down to their individual experiences. Acknowledging the small, daily realities. Like…" He groped for something concrete and found that the last unfrosted cupcake had made its way into his hand. "Like recognizing that someone prefers red velvet to any other kind of cake."

"Reductionist," Taylor said. She sounded affectionate, so he smiled back at her.

"And true."


End file.
